Just to be precise: I am not asking how any cheating-detecting systems are working.

I just happened to realize that I had another account on another email address hanging around some years back; and that got me wondering ... how many people might do that on purpose: create one, several little "helper" accounts to give their reputation a little push here or there; or you know; those days when you already collected 180 reputation; and you would just need 20 more to get one step closer to the "legendary" badge.

I would hope/assume that many people trying that get caught ... so, I am wondering: how many are there; and what the most common practices cheaters come up with?

"helper" accounts Most people are familiar with the term "sock puppet"
– LaurelAug 7 '16 at 23:49

10

Even in aggregate, this is information that essentially requires a diamond to access... which means it falls under the mod agreement, which means you're unlikely to get a meaningful answer - even if someone had the energy to track and itemize each instance we catch.
– Undo♦Aug 8 '16 at 2:43

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@undo: The mod agreement doesn't preclude providing stats so long as you don't disclose anyone's PII. Shog9 does this all the time; presumably any employees carrying a diamond are bound by the mod agreement just as we are. Pretty much the only other information we keep secret other than PII is any that cheaters could use to their advantage to avoid detection (even though, let's face it, they'll still get caught eventually, and suffer heavier losses by then).
– BoltClock♦Aug 8 '16 at 3:38

How is this information about how many are caught useful? And why would it be to anyone's interest to generate a laundry list of "common practices" for cheaters? To me, this is either a waste of time or a fishing expedition.
– Cody Gray♦Aug 8 '16 at 12:23

How many cheaters are caught per month? All of them.
– meagar♦Aug 10 '16 at 14:59

2

Meh, you don't need sock puppets to get 20 rep, all you need is to scream in chat "GIVE ME 20 REP TO GET TO 200!!!" Works every time.
– AthariAug 10 '16 at 15:21

5

@Squidward If it is that easy; please click on my userid; turn to my SO answers and upvote those 18 of them that you think deserve upvoting. I really need an ego boost today. Of course, this is just being sarcastic; I am not asking you to upvote for no valid reason. And you are saying such requests work out?
– GhostCatAug 10 '16 at 15:24

@Squidward See what I mean: people are upvoting my comment above; but my reputation just sits there and didn't move a bit after publishing my request!
– GhostCatAug 10 '16 at 15:30

1

@meagar i think that you meant to say "All of them ... that we know of"
– MawgAug 10 '16 at 15:45

2 Answers
2

I reopened the question because I wanted to have a place to aggregate some stats for future reference.

It is not expressly against the rules to have multiple accounts, only to use multiple accounts to do anything you could not do with a single account. That includes voting for yourself (sock puppets), evading question bans, circumventing post limits, evading suspensions, and targeting others with downvotes or flags.

In the last month, moderators have warned or suspended 116 users for operating sock puppets to vote for their main account. The vast majority of these appear to have been used to circumvent question bans.

Likewise, moderators have warned or suspended 167 users for participating in coordinated voting schemes to boost each others' reputation (voting rings). Again, this largely was used to allow these users to evade question-asking limits.

Much of this voting fraud is detected and dealt with quietly by moderators, and it's important to us that people be able to trust the voting system. In my eyes, cleaning up voting fraud has made a noticeable improvement in the quality of certain tags by blocking question ban evaders and allowing legitimately good content to rise up.

Voting fraud is far more common on Stack Overflow than anywhere else in the Stack Exchange network, and not just due to its relative size. The fact that many people rely on Stack Overflow to do their jobs, combined with the use of question bans for low-quality posts, leads more desperate users to do what they can to keep asking questions. The common patterns in the creation of these accounts led me to ask this, but the conversation there went in a different direction.

To Laurel's point about plagiarism, we tend to message 20-30 users a month for plagiarism on Stack Overflow. Documentation has bumped that up a bit, but moderators on SO aren't entirely handling plagiarism reports for Documentation, so I can't say what the numbers are for certain. It's a much less common occurrence than voting fraud, but it's also more of a pain to deal with once detected.

Overall, the numbers of users mentioned above is tiny compared to the number of active users on Stack Overflow during that same period of time.

It's nice to have some real figures! (There's only so much data I have access to as a pseudo-moderator :)) Is the 116 and 167 per month?
– LaurelAug 8 '16 at 15:54

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@Laurel - Yup, last 30 days. There will be some variability, month-to-month, depending on what we come across and whether we're sweeping through older accounts.
– Brad Larson♦Aug 8 '16 at 15:58

9

Why was the question closed in the first place?
– Fermi paradoxAug 10 '16 at 13:54

1

I would expect these numbers will spike in September, as school starts up again. Would be interesting to see the numbers for that month.
– AaroninusAug 10 '16 at 13:59

"..and it's important to us that people be able to trust the voting system" - Then you should also apply vote reversal on other voting schemes.
– Fermi paradoxAug 10 '16 at 14:01

1

@Fermiparadox - Did you happen to notice who deleted most of those answers? In general, all reputation gained by those answers is gone after deletion. What you point out there isn't so much an issue of trust in the voting system (the answers did work, and people legitimately voted for them of their own free will, they just were copied) as one of gaming the system in other ways. Yes, we regularly delete plagiarized or otherwise copied answers and warn or suspend plagiarists (with the frequency noted above).
– Brad Larson♦Aug 10 '16 at 14:17

@BradLarson I can't see who deleted them, my rep is low. The users that voted up those answers wasted their time on reading (effectively) the same answer twice. Reading an answer, then 3 copies of it didn't benefit them. They simply were deceived (didn't notice dates, content similarities, user posting patterns etc). Therefor the user got rep in non legitimate ways. Perhaps there is a delay in rep removal since currently there are 22up, 2downvotes and 835 rep.
– Fermi paradoxAug 10 '16 at 15:05

I know this question is old, but I'm wondering if you could share some insight into how stackoverflow/stackexchange thinks about deliberate voting rings vs. an implicit voting ring, e.g. a clique that arises semi-organically?
– thcApr 26 at 19:00

@thc - Many tags and subject matter areas attract small groups of people who end up voting for each other just by the nature of their small area. We do our best to distinguish between those and the people more artificially coordinating votes. Moderators can't directly invalidate votes ourselves, so we have to provide evidence to SE staff that something outside of the norm is going on, and they have to investigate based on these reports and manually invalidate if they agree with our assessment. I won't go into the full list of things we check against, but physical location is one.
– Brad Larson♦Apr 26 at 20:02

I'm not a mod, but I think I can still give some insight into this. I don't have access to any of the mod tools that deal with the majority of this stuff, but I'm also not bound by the moderator agreement.

Those "helper" accounts are typically called sock-puppets. Another similar type of voting-fraud, voting-rings, are multiple people that agree to up vote (or accept) each other's questions/answers to gain rep.

In any case, the fact that voting is unlocked at 15 rep means helps to limit things a little. Of course, there are serial voting scripts that will detect and reverse most serial-voting.

I've actually helped take down a whole group of accounts, spanning two sites on the network. It's a pretty epic story. I'm not sure the entire back story (it was probably more than voting fraud), but the accounts weren't up to any good and are now destroyed.

Note it's usually best to flag a mod instead of posting to meta if you suspect something's up. The first revisions of that answer were made before I figured out a bunch of the important details; it was only after subsequent research and edits that I realized that something mod-worthy was happening and flagged mods on both sites.

You might also be interested in looking at Smokey. It deals mostly with spam and abusive content, which isn't quite "cheating" in my mind. (It catches bad stuff, but at least it's usually obvious.)

I'm certain that the most common kind of "cheating" on some parts of the site (Docs and tag wikis, mostly) is plagiarism:

Includes content that is copied from another source without proper attribution.

You can look through my review history, (especially earlier on, things have died down), and see all the stuff I rejected as copied content.

For the purpose of completeness, I'm also going to mention FGITW and SCITE (the latter has "cheater" in the name). Neither of those strategies are against the rules, but it's often considered bad form.